


Volcano Fire Blue Lagoon

by OkieDokieB



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/M, M/M, Prophecy, and Coran the Low-Keyest Wizard of all time, and elves, and nyphs, ill tag as i go along, keith is so stupid i love him, lance is also stupid and keith might love him, theres mermaids
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 12:55:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8490643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OkieDokieB/pseuds/OkieDokieB
Summary: “There is a prophecy. We don’t know, even now, where it came from, but its carved on the wall, on the other side from here, all over it. We grow up with it as a bedtime story but the higher ones know it’s no such thing.
“A boy that’s half of what destroys the south destroys the wall and saves us all,Volcano fire, blue lagoon, mountain deep and flower bloomThe loch a lake, the wall a gate, blood a payment, love at stakeA boy that’s half of the hearts and hands that built the wall will save us all.”
Keith swallowed shallowly. “And you think that’s about me? You think I can destroy The Wall? Why would I destroy The Wall?! I shower using a broken drainpipe and I own a single outfit, I’m no saviour!”





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! And welcome to my first published Voltron Fic!! I Hope you enjoy it!! I'm deep in the Klance trashcan!!  
> This is mostly a chapter to get thing up on stilts and moving so i tried to shift through it as easily as i could (I tend to get bogged down in details)  
> My beta is myself and i am unreliable so let me know about any errors if you want to and i will fix them pronto :)  
> without further or do

Keith stared at the figure in his open doorway. It appeared to be a man, tall and broad and cast in shadow. The lamp from the street behind him highlighted a white forelock in his otherwise dark, close-cropped hair and also the fact his feet didn’t quite exist. The silhouette faded closer to the ground, as if he was no more than a mirage. Or a ghost.

“Yeah?” Keith asked brusquely, slowly reaching under his pillow for his knife. Ghost or no, Keith wasn’t going to be easy prey.

When it spoke, Keith could make out, barely, the movement of the man’s mouth and the glint of his teeth as he adjusted to the lowlight. “There’s something you have to do, Keith.” He must have seen the challenge in Keith’s narrowed eyes because he rephrased, his voice much more gentle than one would expect of a spectre. “There’s something we need you help with, more accurately. There’s a force, or an army, whichever you think is worse, in the Re-Charted, planning to march South as we speak. If they do, everything you know will be set to flame. Everyone you know will be dead.”

“What d’you think the wall is for, decoration?” Keith huffed, swinging his legs off the side of the bed, back ramrod straight and muscles tensed. The wall was a winding barrier slicing the continent into two uneven segments: the slightly larger south, south-west, which held the non-threats, the humans, the reformed and the law; and the North, north-east, nicknamed Re-Charted or more colloquially No-Man’s Land, not because it was ungoverned but because there was not a single human alive on that side. It instead held monsters, they say, that can’t be killed, only caged. The stories of these creatures exist only because of old scriptures from when the wall was built, far too long ago, and the missing people that think they would like a look around over there and end up there for the rest of their short lives. Or so the bloody bones dumped in a neat pile at the gate seem to say.

“I don’t suppose you know how the wall works?” The ghost said. “They don’t talk about it much down here,” he muttered to himself before continuing, “It doesn’t just keep everything that’s in, in. It was designed to let some things pass freely through in either direction, like humans, whilst some creatures can only go into it, never back out. The wall was made specifically for humans to be able to chase them in and thus corral the things they couldn’t control.” _Monsters_ , thought Keith. “But not all of these things were dangerous. They locked up hydra with nymph, Kappa with mermaid, Goblins with Elves, Dragons with Fae.” He sounded almost sad, but Keith wouldn’t be conned.

“What’s this gotta do with me? If they have a problem with the wall, they’ve had centuries to fix it. And I don’t know any magic to.” He added as an afterthought, wondering if the spirit was here to ask him to magic everything better. Not like it was likely, as Keith was the most human human there ever was.

“I wish I could tell you everything, but everything is not known.” The silhouette quivered, as if the air around him was unstable, before flickering back to his mostly opaque form. Keith began to understand that this creature was not supposed to be here, wasn’t supposed to be on this side of the wall at all and it would be dangerous for him to come this far south. That’s why he didn’t interrupt as he began to speak again, quicker this time. “There is a prophecy. We don’t know, even now, where it came from, but its carved on the wall, on the other side from here, all over it. We grow up with it as a bedtime story but the higher ones know it’s no such thing.

“A boy that’s half of what destroys the south destroys the wall and saves us all,  
Volcano fire, blue lagoon, mountain deep and flower bloom  
The loch a lake, the wall a gate, blood a payment, love at stake  
A boy that’s half of the hearts and hands that built the wall will save us all.”

Keith swallowed shallowly. “And you think that’s about me? You think I can destroy _The_ _Wall?_ Why would I destroy The Wall?! I shower using a broken drainpipe and I own a single outfit, I’m no saviour.”

“We know it is. We know you can. And you have to.” The spirit walked into the room as well as one can when they seem to be incorporeal and Keith hastily scrambled back. The spirit stopped, hand outstretched and suddenly the room was lighter, as if a fire had been lit in the grate behind Keith. The spirits face was handsome, sure, but sad. A scar marked the bridge of his nose and the white on his hair brought out the whites of his eyes. He looked surprised suddenly, as if Keith had grown another head. Then he flickered again, like a reflection on rippling water. “Find the mermaid to the west. I have to go, but find the mermaid. You’ll be fine with h-“ The man vanishes in the breeze that courses through the room, slamming the door shut and snuffing the fire out in one swift motion.

However, when Keith turns to lie back down, he sees the fireplace hasn’t been touched, the ash still cold. He ignores the faint glow of his hands as he pulls his sleeves over them and curls back under the covers and doesn’t sleep.

_____

Keith sighed again, leaning on the same tavern wall he had been for two hours. It was stuffy in there, smelled like sweat and stale alcohol and it was _noisy._ Keith lived alone in a cheap top floor apartment in the poor district of Transadel, and an old woman lived below him. He had no friends, barely even acquaintances. He worked where he could, but often helped the seamstresses on the block with the heavy lifting and occasionally with fixing a sewing machine. Overall, he lived a quiet life, and this tavern didn’t quite fit in to what he was comfortable with. But that was the whole reason he was there, in the most western tavern Transadel hosted, listening in to any conversations he could. His mid-night encounter had happened 2 days ago, and for 2 days Keith had agonised over what happened, what it meant and what he should do.

There was the obvious answer to what it meant; the spirit had quite clearly told him to find a _mermaid_ in the _west_ , but who was this spirit and what made him think he was gonna find a mermaid this far below the wall, in Transadan, the furthest country from the capital and thus the gate to the Wall where the _very rare_ reformees came through every century or so? Exactly. But still, here he was, the best place to find information fast, the furthest west he could go without leaving his city, desperately listening for some hint of-

“-mermaid. Don’t know what he took me and the boys for but he was making a pretty dime selling ‘em. Could have been some rainbow trout for all I knew.”  
“He could have found one though, right? Tirei isn’t far from the Coda Lagoon, and I heard they don’t bother checking half of that part of The Wall, since it’s under water and all.”  
“Don’t be an idiot. Most of The Wall is underwater, just the side that separates us from them on the mainland is actually _on land_. The side that keeps those things from swimming their way round to us and eating your fat ass is completely in water.”  
“Oh right. They might have found a way to like, dig under, or something, aint ya think?” Keith could feel his patience vanishing out the door, the way he so desperately wanted to himself.  
“Did you get taught a thing as a kid or did you just pop out your momma a 30 year old idiot.” Keith moved closer to the bar where the three men were sitting. “Everyone knows you can’t dig under them, ‘cos they isn’t made of no stone or brick. Back when people did magic, they made a magic barrier, that we could walk through but them freaks couldn’t. My pa’ used to say it touched the sky all the way up and then all the way back to the centre of the world. Had a friend in Bentalin that says to me it looked like a kind of purple curtain. Kinda see-through-y.” Keith had had enough.

“Did you say something about a mermaid?” he asked gruffly, leaning on the bar. The three men looked over at him distastefully and Keith went over which weapon he had on him that would be the easiest to grab. Then the first man spoke again.  
“You one of them… one of them _freak fanatics_?” He narrowed his eyes, and the other men moved from leaning against the bar to facing him.  
Keith raised his eyebrow. “No.” The men took a moment to chew over his (pretty explicit, in Keith’s opinion) response before relaxing slightly.  
“Some kid up in Tirei was selling bags of mermaid scales for a fortune, says he knew a mermaid or something. Whole bunch of shit, sounded like to me.” He downed the rest of his drink. “Aint no mermaid down here, and certainly aint none that’d be giving up scales to a scrawny brat like that.” Keith knew this man was wrong. He couldn’t have told you why he trusted a spirit that turned up in his apartment at midnight more than a man who’d seen these scales himself, but there was a mermaid, and a kid in Tirei, the most west and close to The Wall as you could get in all of the South.  
“What’d he look like?” Keith asked, irrevocably certain in what he would do.  
“The kid? Uh, this was last week, I don’t know if he’s still there…” he took a glance at Keith’s face and continued. “Um, little taller than you maybe, brown hair, tan. Early 20’s maybe. He had a sign written on driftwood. That’s all I can tell you, didn’t stick around long.” He and his buddies guffawed. Keith left the tavern at 12:47pm with a fire in his stomach and left Transadel at 6:13am on the back of a merchant’s cart.

_____

 

It took a humid 5 days to get to Tirei, which Keith didn’t think was too bad. He’d never really travelled, ever. He was born in Transadel, Transadan and figured he’d live there forever. But here he was, in Tirei, Transadan so he _was_ still in the same country, he supposed, but it was still further than he’d ever gone before. Progress. When he got to Tirei, which turned out to be much smaller than Transadel, it wasn’t all that hard to hear about the mermaid kid. According to the woman selling unidentifiable meat on a stick, he picked out his corner every week day and tried to peddle his mermaid scales and his ‘deep lagoon treasures’ that he said his mermaid girlfriend brought him. And according to the barkeep of the boarding-house, he didn’t live anywhere in the town, only coming in to sell his wares at the corner by the fountain in the centre of the town and then leaving again at the end of the day. So after spending the rest of the day buying food and the night and an inn (and subsequently a majority of his money), Keith woke up early as he was wont to do and parked himself at the corner in question. And also fell asleep waiting.

He felt something poke him in the shoulder and lifted his head, swiping his hair out of his face. “I thought you were too clean to be dead,” a voice said. Keith was faced with a lanky silhouette, the sun shining behind his head like a starburst halo and thus darkening his features. “but since you’re alive, I’m gonna have to ask you to scoot your ass. Preferably far. I’ve got peddling to do.” Keith stood up, still trying to blink his sleepiness away in the harsh mid-morning sun, and was unceremoniously hip-checked out of the way by the figure. He stumbled away and watched a boy around his age, taller, thinner but as broad in the shoulders, with caramel skin and sapphire eyes, wearing a dusty blue shirt and ragged brown pants that just ghosted above his ankles and allowed a sliver of white-grey bandage to show through. He was wearing sandals that looked older than Keith. The boy was setting up a stall make of a holey umbrella, a mouldy wooden chair, a rickety old bar stool, a plank of wood laid between and a piece of driftwood leant against the chair that read ‘ **REEL mermayde ~~mech~~ merchindice!! **83arus/bag’, the words scraped in unevenly and unprofessionally.

Keith continued to watch as he then began removing small bags of navy material, tied with what looked like scraps of shoelace, and gently placing them on the horizontal plank of wood that was acting as a table. Keith thought the boy looked sad as he placed all six bags in a line, and wondered if perhaps he wished he had more to sell. How did one hope to get scales from a mermaid in the first place? The grim realization washed through Keith like a slow, ice cold wave. They would have to be pried off. Keith swore to every deity that if this boy had killed his mermaid, he was going to… he was going to do a thing. A really rash thing. He had to keep a cool head though, if he were to ever get any information from this kid about the mermaid’s whereabouts, if she were even still alive. So with all the grace he had accumulated over his 19 years, Keith stepped up closer as the boy pulled out a clear jar containing a few-

Keith’s entire thought process stuttered when he saw them. They were no scales he had ever seen on any fish in his market, and were certainly no rainbow trout, that was for sure. Each were shaped like a large teardrop and they looked like they emitted their own blue glow (even in direct sunlight) whilst the scales themselves looked like they were made of clear crystal, or diamonds, or opal, or sapphire, or amethyst and sparkled like it too. He understood the old-wives’ tale that they bought luck, believed they could buy anything, they looked more precious than any gemstone Keith had ever read about, seen in pictures, heard of. His first instinct was to buy them, use what money he had left and have them all, but then he wondered how beautiful a creature was that could have made them, been made _of_ them. And this kid was ripping it apart for 83 arus a bag.  


“See something you like?” The boy raised an eyebrow, smirking. Keith spoke without thinking.  
“They’re beautiful.” He said quietly. He heard the boy snort softly and tore his eyes away from the jar to look at him. “Why the fuck would take them like that?” The boy’s blue eyes shot open.  
“Excuse me?” Keith only scowled. “It almost sounds like you care about a mermaid.” He scoffed, but his eyes were wary, glancing at Keith’s clenched fists.  
“Almost does, doesn’t it.” He took another step. “Is she dead? Or did you just leave her bleeding in the shallows up in Coda?” Keith knew he had a temper, but he usually realised it after it had raised its head and razed a village. He was guessing about Coda Lagoon but the boy’s eyes narrowed anyway.  
“Her? You sound like you know her. Maybe you should go ask her, and get away from my stall. I’m trying to make a living here.” He turned his head to a young couple passing by and grinned at them. Keith slammed his hand on to the plank acting as a table. Quick as a flash, the boy gathered up the jar and a few pouches. “Careful! Do you know how much these cost?”  
Keith was tempted to reply with a ’83 arus’ but he knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere with this guy. “Listen,” he began, breathing deep. “I need to meet this mermaid. It’s more important than you could understand,” _I think_ , “So I would appreciate it if you would tell me where I could find her.” Keith saw the boy’s sharp jaw twitch and his breathing marginally speed up.  
“What do you need her for?” he asked after a moment. Keith didn’t look a gift kelpie in the mouth, or whatever, though and breathed a tiny sigh of relief.  
“I heard she was here. I need to talk to her.”  
“About?” He asked petulantly, beginning to pack away his pouches slowly, perhaps still worried Keith would damage them.  
“About The Wall.” Keith replied flatly. It was technically true. He had to ask her about what was _written on_ The Wall but still. Semantics. However, this seemed to panic the boy.  
“Who are you? Are you with the guards?!” He packed up even quicker, his eyebrows furrowing harshly, yet his blue eyes still held a hint of fear.

“Hey, no, wait,” Keith held his hands up. He couldn’t lose the mermaid kid; this was his only lead (even if he was a dirty poacher). “Look, I’m just here looking for the mermaid to talk. I swear.” The boy looked unconvinced but stopped shoving things in his bag to warily look the other up and down, in case he had a tattoo poking out of his collar that read ‘I’M UNRUSTWORTHY’. He stuck his hand straight out. “I’m Keith.”

There was a tense moment of silence.

“Cool.”

Keith internally groaned and dropped his hand.

“Listen, I’ve got something to do this weekend but,” the tanned man breathed heavily and looked at his feet, “if you’re still here Monday Night, I’ll take you.”  
“To the mermaid?!”  
“No, to Prom, you idiot. Yes, the mermaid. But you can’t tell anyone about this. And you have to promise not to hurt them. Ok?” He looked uncomfortable, Keith could feel the temperature of his face rise from the two feet he was away.  
“Ok.” Keith almost smiled. “Monday night it is.”

There was a tense moment of silence.

“So are you gonna walk away or-“  
“Oh yeah ok. Bye.”  
“Um yeah. Bye Keith.”

Keith ended up having enough money for one more night in the tavern if he wanted to eat for the rest of the weekend, so he enjoyed the bed and slept extra hard for a night and then sat beside the fountain for two days straight. He’d never had trouble staying still. Sure, when he moved he _moved_ , but he could be still too. He was the flames of a raging forest fire or the embers of a dying campfire. He moved to eat out of his bag, to drink from the fountain, and to pee, obviously, but otherwise he sat on the stone flags and waited, eyes peeled on the red-brick corner that the man had vacated sometime on Friday. He dreamt of rivers and lakes and lagoons in the shape of an iris in a tanned face.

If anyone had known Keith well before he left for Tirei, they would have wondered at his sudden single-minded determination. The only thing Keith did was work to eat to sleep. But perhaps all he needed was a direction, a sign that said ‘this way’, and here one was, handed to him on a slightly apocalyptic, overly dramatic platter with a side of exuberant prophecy, but it was what it was. Keith had a purpose now, and he was gonna fulfil the shit out of it.

**Author's Note:**

> p r o b l e m a t i c b o i z
> 
> So that's number 1 done and dusted, and next chapter keith may or may not Leave the country (im taking bets considering i also havent written it all yet) Hopefully, it will be out next weekend. I am a poor, unfortunate art student with a workload bigger than like my self-esteem when I'm drunk, and i drown in art pls help me.  
> nvrtheless im exited for this so i will try to write as quickly as poss!
> 
> btw you can also find that map here> http://zivazero.tumblr.com/post/152831625822/this-is-the-hopefully-helpful-map-for-my-far-too
> 
> So see you soon, hope you enjoyed, please leave a comment, and get hyped for numero dos, because we might have a cute night time scene in a boat occuring <3


End file.
